Maryland State GIS Conference (TuGIS)

The workshop evaluations are in

I had a great time teaching our two workshops at the TuGIS conference. In the morning, my students and I presented Spatial SQL: A Language for Geographers, and in the afternoon we taught Python for Geospatial.

We knew expectations would be high: both courses sold-out in 2 days, and we even expanded the class size to 38 people for each workshop!! I knew that teaching 38 people would be a challenge, but it would also be a great lesson to see if we could corral so many cats into a single, technical workshop. The workshop evaluations would be crucial to determine if we met our objectives.

The workshop evaluations were overwhelmingly positive. For example:

over 90% said they enjoyed the workshop.

over 83% said it was much better than other GIS training they have been to.

on a scale of 1-10, 95% of the attendees rated the course a 7 or above.

93% said they learned something new in the workshop.

89% said the workshops would help them in their careers.

91% said they would apply these skills to their job.

I decided to throw one curve-ball on the evaluation sheet and asked:

This was a half-day workshop. Most one-day GIS training classes cost around $600/day. If we developed other in-depth full-day workshops on topics like this for under $250, how likely would you be to participate in it?

it turned out that 89% of the respondents rated a 7 or higher, indicating that almost 90% of the people valued the training enough to pay $250 for a full day course (opposed to $600 for most GIS courses). This means it is possible to offer really good, low cost training to GIS professionals. Keep an eye out on this, as I am very likely to take these training classes on the road.

The comments the participants provided were great – it confirmed our belief that this was an excellent training course, and that the course needed to be expanded to 8 hours, rather than 4 hours – most everyone felt like their was simply too much information to absorb.

If you would like to see the results of the workshop evaluation, click the link below:

Finally, if you can’t make it to a live workshop, all of my video training courses are $30 or less, when you visit www.gisadvisor.com. These courses can’t get into the level of depth that a live course gives, but you’ll see that after thousands of students taking the courses, close to 90% of them give the course 4 starts out of 5!